Getting Started with GitHub

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👋 Welcome to Introduction to GitHub

We're glad you're here. You'll perform some actions to help you become familiar with GitHub... using GitHub!

👇 This is an expandable dialogue! Click to open as you find these throughout the course.

What is GitHub?

What is GitHub?

We are glad you asked! Many people stumble onto GitHub through one of the millions of Open Source projects it holds or because their employer or professor is using it. Why do these projects use GitHub?

At its heart, GitHub is a collaboration platform.

People around the world use GitHub to collaborate on projects ranging from software to policy documents and cookbooks. You can share your projects with the world and invite your friends to help, or you can keep your projects private and still have easy access wherever you are.

GitHub is also a powerful version control tool.

While you are collaborating, GitHub uses Git (open source, distributed version control software) to keep track of every change made to your project.

GitHub is so much more.

GitHub is used to build some of the most powerful applications in the world. It can do a lot of really cool things, but this class is going to focus on getting you started with the basics. We will dig in to the rest later!

📺 Video: What is GitHub?

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This is an issue, a place where you can hold conversations with other collaborators about bugs in your code, feature requests, or any other topic you wish.

Issue titles are a lot like email subject lines: they tell your collaborators what the issue is about at a glance. The title of this issue is Turn on GitHub Pages, more on that later!

Using GitHub Issues

Using GitHub Issues

GitHub Issues are used to record and discuss ideas, enhancements, tasks, and bugs. They make collaboration easier by:

• Replacing email for project discussions, ensuring everyone (even future team members) has the complete story.
• Allowing you to cross-link to other Issues and Pull requests.
• Creating a single, comprehensive record of how and why you made certain decisions.
• Allowing you to easily pull the right people into a conversation with @ mentions and team mentions.

📺 Video: Using Issues

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Managing notifications

Managing Notifications

Once you've commented on an issue or pull request, email notifications will start to pour in. By default, notifications will be sent by email when there is activity in the thread.
You can also choose to receive notifications of a full repository. Whenever there is a new issue, pull request or comment posted you will get a notification.

You can silence or unmute notifications of individual issues and pull requests.

1. Go to the issue or pull request.
2. Click the (Un)subscribe button on the right, under Notifications
   Underneath the button a short description explains the current notification status.

You can customize notifications in Settings.

1. Click your profile icon.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Notifications from the menu on the left.
   Here you can adjust your notification preferences.

You can choose to receive notifications from a repository.

• Watch: You will receive a notification when a new issue, pull request or comment is posted, and when an issue is closed or a pull request is merged.
• Not watching: Stop receiving notifications, but @ mentions will still alert you.
• Ignore: Stop all notifications.

You can review notifications for the repositories you are already watching.

1. Click your profile icon.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Notification from the menu on the left.
4. Click on the repositories you’re watching link.
5. Select the Watching tab.
6. Click the (Un)watch button to disable or enable notifications for that repository.

📺 Video: Watching, Notifications, Stars, and Explore

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This issue is unassigned 😞

Unassigned issues don't have someone to look after them. Assigned issues and pull requests tells visitors to your repository that you'll be facilitating this particular conversation 💪.

📝 Activity

1. On the right side of the screen, under the Assignees section, click assign yourself.